New Faculty Spotlight: Rebecca N. Liu

Read our Q&A with our new assistant professor of English.

Welcome to Rebecca N. Liu, our newest professor in the Department of English. Liu’s research and teaching interests include Asian American literature, global Asias, Marxist feminism and critical race and ethnic studies.

She is currently teaching ENGL349A: “Asian American Literatures: Global Capitalism, Migration, Belonging” for fall 2023. Her book project in progress, titled “Contract Spirit: Asian American Literature after the Coolie Trade,” explores how legacies of Asian indenture and the contract form configure race, labor and social reproduction from the nineteenth century to the present.

Liu received her Ph.D. in English and interdisciplinary humanities from Princeton University. She also earned an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Texas at Austin and graduated with a B.A. in English and comparative literature and B.A. in creative writing from Columbia University.

How did you become interested in your areas of expertise?

I studied English literature and creative writing in undergrad, but it wasn’t until I took a course in premodern race in graduate school that I became interested in the evolving commercial and cultural connections between Europe and Asia since the Middle Ages. In that class, I was blown away when we read contact literature from the thirteenth century written by Franciscan friars visiting the Mongol Empire. Encountering these works has informed my research into the longer histories of Asian racialization as it intersects with Asian American literature and studies in global Asias.

What are you most excited about in your role as assistant professor?

Teaching the wonderful students at UMD! I’ve had a chance to meet some of them and have really appreciated their thoughtful contributions in class. I’m also thrilled to join an English department with such warm mentorship and support for junior faculty.

What is your favorite aspect of teaching English?

English courses provide an opportunity to study, among other things, questions of identity, power, belonging and freedom through unique aesthetic and cultural forms. My favorite moments in class are when students recognize how historical and political forces are expressed in strange, contradictory ways in a work of literature, and how reading literature, in turn, can help us make sense of our lives and the world.